A Flare in the Jet of Pictor A

Abstract

A Chandra X-ray imaging observation of the jet in Pictor A showed a feature that appears to be a flare that faded between 2000 and 2002. The feature was not detected in a follow-up observation in 2009. The jet itself is over 150 kpc long and a kpc wide, so finding year-long variability is surprising. Assuming a synchrotron origin of the observed high-energy photons and a minimum energy condition for the outflow, the synchrotron loss time of the X-ray emitting electrons is of order 1200 yr, which is much longer than the observed variability timescale. This leads to the possibility that the variable X-ray emission arises from a very small sub-volume of the jet, characterized by magnetic field that is substantially larger than the average over the jet.

12 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Ap. J. Letters

References in corpus (3)

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• New Chandra observations of the jet in 3C273. I. Softer X-ray than radio spectra and the X-ray emission mechanism
• Long Term Monitoring of the Dynamics and Particle Acceleration of Knots in the Jet of Centaurus A

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